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Behind Russia's drive and Russia's political aims was the stubborn fact that the Soviet Union had emerged as the greatest power in Europe, able (and probably willing) to fill the political void which would be left by the crushing of Germany, and which neither weakened Britain nor weakened France could hope to fill. But instinctively Americans and Britons sensed that this was more than the usual political crisis. Instinctively they sensed that the hands of the clock of history had suddenly bumped ahead to a later hour, that that crisis in western civilization of which World War II had been the organic symptom had reached a new stage. Before the impending Big Three conference lay the alternatives: peace—as lasting a peace as men could contrive through the adjustment of differences between the only three great powers which after World War II would be capable of waging effective war; or the alternative which most Americans preferred not to think of, even in the privacy of their own minds—World War III. The success or failure of the meeting was in a large measure up to one man—Joseph Stalin. Who was this man in whose hands, for good or evil, lay so heavy a responsibility for the world's destiny?
The Face of History. He was a little man (5 ft. 5 in.), two inches taller than Napoleon. But most Americans discovered this fact (to their surprise) only after the Teheran conference. For some 20 years before that, Americans had known Stalin chiefly from a few carefully posed photographs which made him look tall, and from Soviet statues and paintings which were invariably heroic. To the western world Stalin was chiefly a face and a focus for disturbing rumors.
It was the kind of face that was more disquieting when it smiled than when it was sober. Over the years it had slowly changed. In Stalin's youth his face had been delicately handsome, but revolution, war, power and, above all, will had abraded it into somber strength. The hair, which had been purplish black like most Georgians', and grew far forward on the low forehead, had turned grey. The eyes, which had once peered out from velvety depths of unfathomable distrust ("Lenin trusts Stalin," old Bolsheviks used to say, "and Stalin trusts nobody"), had acquired an expression almost of authoritative benevolence.
Americans would have done well to ponder upon that face, for it was something new under the sun. The stubborn fact about the face of Stalin was that it was less the face of a man than of a historic force. It was the face of the first proletarian Bolshevik to become unquestioned lawgiver and dispenser of dogma to a party whose 4,600,000 members were bound to absolute obedience by an iron-clad discipline. It was also the face of the absolute ruler of some 180,000,000 people of 170 nationalities, living in one-sixth of the earth's surface, in a socialist empire spilling across Europe and Asia from Poland to the Pacific Ocean, and threatening to spill farther.